Edwin Muir Ancient Poems
- 1. Scotland 1941
We were a tribe, a family, a people.
Wallace and Bruce guard now a painted field,
And all may read the folio of our fable,
Peruse the sword, the sceptre and the shield.
... - 2. Robert The Bruce (to Douglas In Dying)
'MY life is done, yet all remains,
The breath has gone, the image not,
The furious shapes once forged in heat
Live on though now no longer hot.
... - 3. Horses
Those lumbering horses in the steady plough,
On the bare field - I wonder, why, just now,
They seemed terrible, so wild and strange,
Like magic power on the stony grange.
... - 4. Circle And Square
รข??I give you half of me;
No more, lest I should make
A ground for perjury.
For your sake, for my sake,
... - 5. The Horses
rld to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
... - 6. Reading In Wartime
Boswell by my bed,
Tolstoy on my table;
Thought the world has bled
For four and a half years,
... - 7. The Incarnate One
The windless northern surge, the sea-gull's scream,
And Calvin's kirk crowning the barren brae.
I think of Giotto the Tuscan shepherd's dream,
Christ, man and creature in their inner day.
...
